Capilano adds raw honey to its range

Capilano, Australia’s largest honey company, has joined the growing ranks of ‘raw’ honey marketers.

Two new Capilano products hit the shelves of Coles supermarkets earlier this month – a raw orange blossom and a raw red gum honey.

Both are labelled ‘unflitered’ and the back label describes them as containing “Pollen and fine honeycomb particles, just as nature intended”.

Raw honey has become increasingly sought in the Australian market after as consumers grow ever more “health-conscious”, and doubtless Capilano hopes to ‘cash-in’ on this trend.

The trend to include ‘provenance’ information, i.e. details about where the honey comes from, is also evident in these new products.

So the orange blossom honey label says that the honey is sourced from the Riverina and Riverland regions of southern Australia.

Capilano has also copied the labelling innovation pioneered by the Raw Honey Company indicating the relative flavour strength and sweetness of the honey.

Like the Raw Honey Company, Capilano’s new raw honeys uses a rating out of five.

However where the Raw Honey Company’s products indicate ratings for both sweetness and flavour strength, Capilano only uses one rating indicator.

Somewhat curiously, this indicates only a 2 out of 5 rating for its new orange blossom honey.

This is curious because orange blossom honey is usually considered amongst the sweetest of honeys, and indeed too sweet for many consumers.

Some keen observers of Coles honey shelves will be aware that the new Capilano products have emerged at the same time as Coles has removed Capilano’s imported Chinese honey brand from its shelves.

Known as Allowrie honey, the cheap Chinese honey has presumably fallen foul of Coles current marketing and promotional campaign which emphasizes that the nation’s largest retailer prefers to stock locally-produced products.

Capilano has strongly denied that Coles decision to dump its imported honey brand has anything to do with the fact of it being mainly Chinese honey.

However some Australian consumers clearly have significant concerns about the quality of Chinese honey and Capilano has faced ongoing criticism over its enthusiasm for marketing cheap Chinese honey to Australian consumers.

It should be noted, nevertheless, that Australia’s other major supermarket chain, Woolworths, is continuing to stock Capilano’s Chinese honey product.

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John Rawcliffe, general manager of New Zealand’s UMF honey industry association, told online news site Stuff.co.nz recently that Australian honey producers are “taking part of the [Maori] creation story and bastardizing it.”

His remarkable claim appears to have little support, but is part of an ongoing campaign intended to block Australian manuka honey producers from access to international markets.